


a la fin du monde

by canimo



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Love, Sad Ending, Tenderness, but also we have, but i do need to reiterate it is sad, discussions of war and casualties, mentions of the holocaust (very brief!), romantic? platonic? both? yes. it doesnt matter bc love is the most important thing in the universe!, sorry - Freeform, think abt how gruesome ep 6 is. those are the vibes here., you can read into either relationship as much as you want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25771945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canimo/pseuds/canimo
Summary: "So she gets a few hours of sleep when she can (day or night, it doesn’t really matter), and she wanders around the church, following the cries for help. She listens to the languages around her and the tell-tale whistle of bombs. She sticks her hands into blood, and she stumbles over bits of wood from a house that was standing just yesterday. And she moves forward, and she stays stagnant."It is 1944, and Renee LeMaire is trying to survive Bastogne.
Relationships: Anna & Renee LeMaire, Renee LeMaire & Eugene Roe
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	a la fin du monde

**Author's Note:**

> i gave you renee content but then i made it sad, so overall i think this is a net neutral.
> 
> i fudged historical accuracy, and if you think too much about the timeline it doesn't make sense so like. dont do that. also french is sprinkled throughout. i tired to leave context clues so you can get the gist, but if i failed at that, translations are in the end notes. holocaust mention is one sentence in the second to last paragraph if you want to skip over it.
> 
> barely edited. proceed with caution.

It comes to the point that Renée doesn’t remember what Bastogne was like before the war. She doesn’t remember what anything was like before the war. As far back as her memories go, the buildings are empty shells of their former glory, and the roads have craters from bomb explosions. There was never a time when she only heard French, or the occasional Flemish from northerners. It seems it has always been a mix of accents — mostly American English with a bit of German and the quick French between her and the other nurses. The present blends with the past too easily, so that even in childhood memories, splashing in the creek at the edge of town, her sister calls to her in English. The water is pinkish red from dying men’s blood. The butterflies don’t land on her anymore, because her chubby toddler hands are caked in that blood. Time crashes in on itself, and every waking moment is surreal. She tries to define the feeling but only ever gets as far as, “It’s fucked up.”

She doesn’t ask the other nurses about it, if they feel the same way, if their steps also feel unsteady. It’s probably for the best. The only way to get through a war is to move forward constantly, step after step, and if she falters even a little, all the progress she’d made would crumble. However, silence about it doesn’t stop her from feeling it and doesn’t stop it from weighing down on her.

So she gets a few hours of sleep when she can (day or night, it doesn’t really matter), and she wanders around the church, following the cries for help. She listens to the languages around her and the tell-tale whistle of bombs. She sticks her hands into blood, and she stumbles over bits of wood from a house that was standing just yesterday. And she moves forward, and she stays stagnant.

In the quiet moments after a lukewarm meal, when sleep is still eluding her, it’s hard not to think, so she avoids the feeling and tries to keep the thoughts as light as she can. _Marie snores loudly. I wonder if I could get some fresh bread tomorrow_ . One day she tried to think of the positives — _at least I am not killing anyone, not like the soldiers_ — but her stomach churned, and she felt too nauseous to continue.

She and the other nurses exchange small talk sometimes, nothing beyond, “It’s fucking cold,” and “Watch your mouth.” It takes a while for Renée to realize that they are probably doing the same thing she is, evading the terror their own minds create, courtesy of the war. Once she recognizes this, it takes everything in her not to blurt it out. _Do you feel like a phantom, too? Like you aren’t entirely here?_

She stops saying her prayers every night. At first she just forgot, too exhausted to remember, but after a while the silence became spiteful. 

* * *

Anna drops dead asleep at the same time as Renée, so they wake up together and walk to the church together. They do it in silence, because what is there to speak of in Bastogne that isn’t war, and Renée has just about fucking had it with war. At least, they are silent until they reach the basement, when Anna turns to her and asks, “Ça va?”

Renée stares at her with wide eyes. It’s a ridiculous question, shockingly so, and she’s tempted to answer with, _merde, Anna, ça va trѐs mal_ , until she gets a good look at Anna and understands it’s not meant as a question. Anna has the same worried furrow between her brows, the same blood stains on her clothes. She knows it’s not alright as well as anyone else. It’s simply an acknowledgement of life. 

Renée brushes her fingers against the back of Anna’s hand, and it’s almost as good as a hug. “Ça va.”

Anna attempts a smile that ends up looking more like a grimace. Another nurse grabs Anna’s arm and takes her to a man moaning in pain, and soon after they leave, a surgeon takes Renée away to help patch up a gaping chest wound. The two of them do not speak to each other for the rest of the day unless it’s something along the lines of, “Bandages? Anna, il a besoin de pansements.”

The flares start that evening, sometime around eight, and by eight-thirty the Bois-Jacques is getting shelled. While the Germans are at it, they hit the edges of Bastogne, too, so by ten o’clock she has been up for sixteen hours and has not sat down once and is jumping at every sound she hears. One of the doctors (an American who she swears she has seen in town before) tells her to go get some sleep, that she’s no use when her hands are this shaky. He walks away without waiting for an answer, and in his wake she inspects her hands. They are dirty and bloody as always, and there is a slight tremor running through them that she hadn’t even noticed. Okay, she thinks. Probably time to sleep.

She sees Anna standing just outside the church, looking up into the inky night sky and searching for bombs that she will never be able to see or outrun. Renee takes a trembling hand and puts it on Anna’s elbow. Anna flinches back until she notices it’s Renée , then relaxes and presses the back of her hand to Renée’s apron. “Ça va?” she asks.

Renée snorts, because her hand is still trembling and she can still hear the agonized screams from the wounded. “Ça va bien. It was a pleasant night,” she replies, voice dripping in sarcasm, and Anna laughs. Together, they walk the block to the house where the nurses get their rest.

The following day, Anna is set to leave the church first. Renée is carrying a box of bloody, unusable bandages when she comes across Anna at the bottom of the stairs, pulling her jacket on.

“Are you leaving?” she asks. Anna nods. “Bien. I’ll go, too.”

They go upstairs. Anna finds Renée’s coat while she’s emptying out the box over the piles of dead bodies (and she tries hard not to think about how cruel it is), and then they make their way to the nurses’ house. The loaf of bread is mostly gone when they get there, and the soup is cold, but someone found blankets in one of the closets, and that’s enough to make it a decent night. She and Anna share one and eat in silence.

“That soup was horrible,” Anna announces once they finish their meals. She is silent for a moment before adding, “I’m going to get a bar of chocolate if it kills me.”

Renée bursts out laughing, the first time she’s laughed in what feels like forever. Anna grins widely at her, only looks away when another one of the women says something like Anna getting chocolate is as likely as a dance with one of the men. Renée doesn’t hear, busy grinning at Anna until her cheeks hurt, busy soaking up Anna’s smile like it’s the last time she’ll see it.

They walk to the church together and leave together the next day and most days after that. On good days, when the sun is bright and warm, she likes to imagine they are two working women in Paris, maybe, heading to and from the office, leading normal, happy lives.

* * *

One day after the battle began, Renée forced her parents to leave Bastogne and go live with her sister in Bouillon. She knew it would not be safe for them, the knowledge of that like a rock sitting heavy in her intestines, so she shooed them out of town, watching a military escort send them west, suitcases filled with as many sacred memories as they could carry. “I’ll be fine,” she said as they hugged goodbye. “Madame Dupond is opening her home to the nurses. I’ll be fine.”

Four days later, Renée watched as her childhood home was hit by a bomb and in a matter of seconds became a pile of rubble.

Bastogne is unrecognizable now. Renée walks past corners where her favorite neighbors lived, the bakery where she got pralines on her way home from church on Sundays, and she doesn’t see the memories, only the blood splattered on the streets. The sweet smell of pine has been entirely covered by the smell of smoke, thick and heavy in the air. It comes as a shock to remember she only came home to be with her family for Christmas, and that the town had not come together to decorate this year, and they never would. She might as well not be in Belgium. She might as well be on the other side of the world.

When she can’t sleep, she walks around town. If she sees something in the rubble worth salvaging, she takes it to the pile of stone that used to be her home and hides it under there. If ever the damn war ends, she’ll take all her trinkets and give them back to their owners. Monsieur André, I am so sorry that your son was killed and your store is gone. Here, I found a family photo. Sorry, I couldn’t save the frame.

She misses Bruxelles. She misses the people all around her, the tall buildings and the winding streets. She could get lost in Bruxelles, she could find a hole-in-wall and drink coffee and forget about the dying men in the hospital. Even when the Germans were suffocating the city, if she played her cards right, if she was careful, she could toast to their surrender and pretend peace was an inevitability.

There is no such escape in Bastogne. There is only war, over and over, day in and day out.

* * *

She likes Anna more than she likes the other nurses. It has nothing to do with the other nurses and everything to do with Anna. In the same way, Renée likes medics more than she likes the other soldiers.

The soldiers who are patients are greedy. Renée puts a bandage over the tear in a man’s thigh, and for every drop of blood that comes out, the man takes a drop of her own. They drain her. She is not bitter about it, because they need it, and she’s here to give them what they need. But there is something nice about meeting the eyes of a man who has been drained of energy and life time and time again, to be able to look at him for a brief moment and say, “I understand,” and hear it back.

So when she finally gets her hands on some chocolate, she gives one bar to Anna. The other goes to Eugene.

Eugene fits neatly inside Bastogne, so neatly that Renée almost forgets he is American and didn’t grow up in the house around the corner. His pale skin like the snow, dark hair and eyes like the shadows lurking underneath the rubble. She asks him once if he remembered the blizzard in 1934. He says that this is only his second snow, that it never snows in Louisiana.

“I always liked snow, but I’d give anything to be in Louisiana right now.” She gives him half a smile that he only partly returns. There is an entire conversation in their smiles, promises made and family to be introduced to, and if Renée gives words to it, she might cry. Instead, she holds his gaze a little bit longer, then moves when she hears her name.

They only ever speak for a few moments at a time, but Renée knows what to do with that. She hardly has any more time to speak to Anna, and over the course of the battle she has learned how to make it count. She takes him to one of the altars they are using as a storeroom, shoves a box in his arms, throws supplies in it and says, without preamble, “Ça va? How was the chocolate?” and he smiles awkwardly, like he’s forgotten how, and says it was good. She mentions her sister’s latest letter and forgets that Eugene doesn’t know her. He uses slang she doesn’t understand and pronounces his French differently. Then they separate.

Anna asks about him. Renée says, “He’s just a medic who speaks French. I get tired of all the English.”

“Don’t say ‘just,’” Anna says. She rips another piece of bread off the half a loaf they share. “If someone asked me about you, I wouldn’t say you are ‘just’ another nurse. How does he know French?”

Renée smiles and presses her shoulder against Anna’s and imagines it’s as comforting as the _merci_ she wishes she could say. “They speak French where he lives. Louisiana.”

Anna hums quietly. She eats more of the bread. Renée takes a piece for herself.

“I told him I’d like to go to Louisiana,” Renée says, because it’s ridiculous, because she can’t believe she said it. Because no one talks of a time outside the war, because the war is the only thing that exists. She expects Anna to shush her, to say as much, but instead Anna looks directly into her eyes with a determined and frightened sort of look.

“Renée,” she says, “you live in Bruxelles?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to go to Bruxelles. Would you come to the Congo with me?”

It surprises Renée that she doesn’t hesitate at all. “Yes.”

Anna looks away suddenly, a deer spooked. She doesn’t say anything for the rest of the night, which says more than Renée can bear.

They went to bed at dawn, so they wake up late in the morning. It’s one of those days when the sun is out, and it means Anna is in a good mood, and she whistles while they walk to church. Renée can’t stop staring at the carnage around her, at the bodies and rubble. The sun is harsh on the destruction, the light making it terribly visible and the shadows terribly sharp. For once she is not hollowly numb or briefly okay, but she feels the weight of the war pressing down on her in full force. She can taste bile in her mouth, and she wants to collapse on the ground and sob, and, more than anything, she wants to grab Anna and be frank for once, say everything on her mind. The jumble of English and French, every horrible confession, every _je t’aime_ and _you are my best friend_ and _je veux vivre_ and _I want you to live, don’t die, s’il te plaît, I can’t do this anymore_ she had kept to herself since the Germans decided they were fond of Bastogne.

Anna stops whistling when a Jeep rolls in front of her, carrying a man with half an arm.

That night she can’t sleep, so she keeps to the shadows of Bastogne and walks. She finds a watch with a cracked face and a box holding a collection of letters. Some are letters from family, some are love letters, some are Christmas notes that had never been sent. She reads all of them in the light of the flares, soaks up every _cher_ and red-ink heart and tear stain on the pages. When she’s finished she hides them with all the rest of the objects, and she forgets that they are not hers.

* * *

The next time Renée sees Eugene, the weight of the _je vous aime_ on the tip of her tongue is too heavy. She says little, just to be safe, but she smiles at him, brushes their hands together as much as she can. _This is all I have_ , she tries to tell him. _I’m sorry_.

It doesn’t seem to cut through to him, though, not like it usually does. The slump of his shoulders is deep and overbearing, and he does not look like he’s gotten a single good night of sleep since she’s seen him last. He flinches whenever someone brushes against him. She knows the feeling, so she says, “Come with me?” and smiles when he nods.

She leads him around to the back of the church, where there is an old, rusty water pump. Thankfully, Eugene does not ask, just lowers his hands and scrubs them while Renée raises and lowers the handle. The water is as cold as the air, so as soon as he’s done, she takes his hands in hers, sharing what little warmth she has.

“Thanks,” Eugene says. “I don’t think it helped any, though.”

“It never does.” She smiles when Eugene does, and continues. “It makes me feel better, though. The idea of it helping. You seemed like you needed it.”

His smile becomes a little tense, so she rubs her hands against his and waits for him to say what he wants to say. When he does, it is this: “I don’t think I can do it anymore. Someone called for a medic, and I just sat in my foxhole.”

She doesn’t know what to say, whether the truth is better than the lie. A few long moments stretch out while she debates what to say, long enough that Eugene’s hands tense and he’s about to pull them away. She can’t let that happen — for selfish or compassionate reasons, she doesn’t know — so she says the first tuning that comes to mind. “At least I met you.”

Eugene smiles again, genuinely this time. It lifts something dark and heavy off of her chest, something that had been there since the Germans got to Bastogne.

“I didn’t eat the chocolate,” he confesses. “I gave most of it to Heffron.”

Renée doesn’t ask who Heffron is or what he’s like, though she’d like to know. Instead, she says, “Ça, c’est la problѐme. The curse of healing hands. We can never be as selfish as we should be.”

They stand there behind the church for a few minutes, but respite is so rare that it feels like it could either be hours or seconds. Eugene moves his hands around so that he is holding Renée as much as she is holding him. His hands are dirty like hers, dirt under his fingernails, blood dried in the lines etched into his skin. They are strong and sturdy, hands meant to pull people up. It exhausts her, and she can tell it exhausts him, too.

Before they go back into the makeshift hospital, Renée pulls Eugene in and presses a kiss into both of his palms. His eyes go dark and his brow furrows, and then he pulls Renée into his arms and squeezes her tight. He’s only marginally warmer than the frigid December air, but still, the heat is almost overwhelming. There is a moment where she feels like she’s been burned, and she wants to sink into it, burn her entire body until the pain of it is the only thing she feels. But then the feeling eases, and all that’s left is the warm flicker of a candle. She rests her chin on his shoulders, and shuts her eyes against the world.

They pull away, and as she watches the jeep pull away, go back towards the Bois-Jacques, she wonders if that’s the last time she’ll ever see him.

* * *

She scrounges around for another bar of chocolate and finds one sticking out of the jacket pocket of one of the surgeons who arrived a few days ago. It’s half eaten, but it’s the good kind, the kind her father splurged on whenever he had the money. Before she leaves for her few hours of rest, she nicks it, shoving it deep into her pocket and removing it only when she and Anna are settled into their little corner and huddled under a threadbare blanket.

“Joyeux Noël,” she says. She can’t take her eyes off Anna’s smile.

“Renée, t’es une _ange_. Je t’adore.” Anna takes the chocolate carefully, like it might disintegrate in her hands. “We’ll share it. Our Christmas day meal.”

“It’s for _you_ —”

“I’ll share my chocolate with whoever,” Anna says. Her smile is still as bright as the sun and as pretty as the constellations, and Renée still can’t look away.

“Alright, then. We’ll share it.”

Renée thinks of that smile all through the next day, when three men die on her watch, when she looks across the room and sees sweat beading on Anna’s forehead, the taut, anxious line of her mouth as she tries to stop a man’s bleeding, the resigned look in her eye that he will die. It gets harder and harder to remember as her thoughts become bloody again, as her hands get stained a deeper, uglier red.

It’s horrible to think that they may not all be mended. She stayed in Bastogne to help, to make people better, but now she is faced with the reality, and all she can do is stop the bleeding, and that only sometimes. The man dies beneath her hands, face pale from blood loss. The chocolate managed to stop Anna’s bleeding for a few hours, but now she is an open wound. Renée has forgotten to check on her own stitches. She does not have the time.

* * *

In 1944, on Christmas Eve, she does not know she is going to die. She does not even think about it. She puts one foot in front of the other, does not stop to think about the shelling, and takes as many wounded men out as she possibly can.

She notices her scarf is gone when she feels the night air on her scalp, when her hair becomes loose and falls in her face. She cannot stop to look around for it, but if she happens to see it she will grab it. There is no time to mourn, but that was her mother’s scarf. Her maman gave that to her.

If she had been paying attention, she would have heard the whistle. She might have had some time to prepare. Instead, her last moments are spent holding the hand of an American man. His grip is tight on hers, tight enough to crack her knuckles but not tight enough to make her wince in pain. She holds his hand and eases him up, trying to get him up and out of town, back to somewhere safe. She puts a hand on his back, comforting against the sounds of the explosions, and the last thing she says before the church crumbles on top of her is whispered into the ear of the wounded soldier. “Ça va, cher, tout va bien. Tout va bien.”

* * *

In 1939, on Christmas Eve, she sneaks out and climbs up onto the roof of her house. If her parents knew, they’d be horrified, but she’s always sure to be careful, and besides, she likes it up there. The air is fresh. The stars stretch out infinitely above her. She can see for miles around her.

A family of deer lingers at the edge of the forest, still and calm in the quiet of the night. She watches them for a long while, marvels at how wonderful it is to be alive right now, to see the deer and the stars and the bright half moon as they are tonight. How beautiful it is to be able to see her breath.

Once the new year passes, she will go back to Bruxelles and continue studying. She will worry about the war quickly encroaching on them, and she will study harder for it, determined to be of help when it comes. Her grand-mѐre and maman will send her sweets, and her father will say that he is so proud. She won’t tell them that she gets the underground papers, that she reads them, and if anyone finds them on her, she will go to jail. She won’t tell them that she’s hiding a Jewish family in her building, and that that is a death sentence. She won’t speak of the anxiety in her veins that leaves her trembling and sick.

But on that night, it is still 1939. She looks at the moon and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> a scene that did not make the final cut: anna shares her christmas meal with eugene. they eat in silence by the rubble of the church.
> 
> french translations:  
> ca va - how are you; it’s okay  
> merde, anna, ca va tres mal - shit, anna, it’s really bad  
> anna, il a besoin de pansements - he needs bandages  
> ca va bien - it’s going well  
> je t’aime, je vous aime - i love you  
> je veux vivre - i want to live  
> c’est la probleme - that's the problem  
> t’es une ange, je t’adore - you’re an angel, i adore you  
> ca va, cher, tout va bien - it’s okay, dear, it’s alright


End file.
